MOTU was showing off something that absolutely blew my mind this morning: Volta.

It’s a plug-in intended for use with any of their DC-capable audio interfaces (Like, say, a Traveller or 828), it allows multi-channel PitchCV/Gate/ControlCV out to your modular system. Its interface is like a grid for your IO, each output is a box in the grid. Into the grid, you place (drag and drop-style) the voltage source for that output. You may choose from items as mundane as the channel’s midi input (for things like note data), or as crazy as step/trigger sequencers, LFOs, clock sources, etc.

This all sounds pretty neat, right? But wait, it gets better…

There’s a built-in calibration and scaling tool, so that it can automatically determine the proper CV scale to generate musical pitches from your possibly-less-than-perfect analog oscillators.

Now how much would you pay?

They couldn’t quote an exact price, but they said to expect in the $250 range. Of course there is the cost of a MOTU audio interface if you don’t already have one. That said, killer product for analog geeks like me, way to go MOTU, I know this must have been a hard one to pitch to management.

Like I said in the last post, couldn’t wait to get home and try it with the modular.

In this installment, I replaced the timbres, now we have a real (distorted) 808 playing the static drum beat, and the modular being played by the midi output of my custom modules in plogue bidule. This time the pitch input of the random clock module is being fed by a short repeating sequence I played and looped into the sequencer…

The modular patch is very similar to the one used from this post, but with the self-playing part of the patch yoinked out and replaced with the gate output of the Doepfer midi->cv/gate converter module. Also, I went ahead and made the whole thing pitched, played from that same module. So yes, you can play FMed sine oscs through lowpass gates in a melodic way, and no, it doesn’t sound half bad when you do so, if you’re careful to tune things properly. Lastly, it’s slathered in reverb-ish delay courtesy of Audio Damage’s Ricochet multi-tap delay.

I spent some time in Plogue Bidule today wiring up a pseudo random clock midi note generator.

This object takes a midi clock as an input, then chooses (randomly) various divisions of that clock to output midi notes. The midi pitches are either hard-set internal to the object or with external midi input. You can weight the divisions heavier by adding that division’s number multiple times in the number text field.

In the example audio below, the notes were chosen by a pseudo-random note generator I patched up awhile back, similar in function to this random gate generator, but for notes instead of gate divisions. The resulting midi was played by the Magical 8bit Plug, with D16’s Nepheton providing the static beat underneath so you can hear the original clock speed unaltered.

I’m looking forward to letting this bad boy loose on my modular, where I was intending on using it primarily as a clock source via midi->cv/gate conversion.

It’s worth mentioning that doing something like this in a pseudo-random way is the most difficult form, once you have that, it’s mostly a matter of *removing* bits of the module to, for instance, make one that switches divisions based upon the value of a midi CC input.

I was really dying for a modular fix, and having just received news that my new case may not arrive until the new year, I threw a basic system together using the one 6u Analogue Systems case I have left at my disposal…

This more or less maxes out the power supply in the case, and definitely uses all the available power connectors on the bus board.

The patch is using midi tempo to clock the S&H and trigger the EGs. The VCA EG is decay-modulated by an LFO, the oscillators are setup as a carrier/modulator pair with sync-feedback and a bandpass filter in the feedback loop, the S&H is setting the pitch of the oscillator you hear, and the overall timbre is itself run through a bandpass filter.

The whole thing is run through an instance of Audio Damage’s Ratshack Reverb (have I mentioned lately how much I love this plugin? No? Consider it mentioned.) to give it a bit of lo-fi slapback echo.